CROSSREF. Start screen customization is discussed in Chapter 5.

Start screen customization is discussed in Chapter 5.

Pinned site tiles can provide simple alphanumeric notification badges just like they can on the taskbar, with the canonical example being an e‑mail service that displays the number of unread e‑mails. But the tiles for pinned websites simply aren’t as expressive as those for Metro‑style apps can be.

Figure 7‑24: All newly pinned items are placed at the end of the Start screen by default.

Within the browser, however, pinned sites also offer another feature borrowed from pinned taskbar sites: Jump lists. So if you tap that site tile, you’ll notice that IE Metro loads with a slightly different user interface, assuming that the pinned site utilizes jump lists: The Pin to Start button in the navigation bar has been replaced by a new menu button. And if you click this button, you’ll see whatever jump list the site provides, as shown in Figure 7‑25. (The items in this menu will vary from site to site.)

Figure 7‑25: A jump list displayed in IE Metro

If you’re familiar with pinned sites in IE 9 and Windows 7, you know that they run in their own browser frame. But this isn’t the case with IE 10 Metro and Windows 8. Instead, these pinned sites load inside the same IE Metro app as any other web pages, and they will load alongside whatever other tabs were already open in the browser.